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Miley: Don’t wear people’s faces on your butt. Thanks, Everyone

I will say that her back is enviously flawless. Right above the dead real people on her butt.

After spending too much time writing about her, I’ve mostly ignored Miley Cyrus in the past few weeks, because I’m waiting for her to get a new shtick, and because that’s what you do to bratty kids who are having an acting out moment. I did get a chance to listen to her album, and it’s excellent. Which has nothing to do with what I’m about to say.

Obviously, this era in time is all about her getting attention and being in the spotlight by any means necessary, all the while trying to look “down.” But this ridiculous dress she wore to the MTV EMA red carpet is more than attention-getting: It’s disrespectful, particularly to the audience she claims she’s trying to be down with. Made by Vintage, it looks like one of those posters you find in black neighborhoods for sale at the gas station parking lot that’s a collage of famous late celebrities with a message. This one says “Please Stop Violence” with pictures of Biggie and Tupac, who, as you might remember, were actual human beings whose senseless stupid deaths highlighted the way that we’re killing each other, for beefs, for slights, for things that don’t compensate your mother when she wakes up in the morning and can’t hug you.

So Miley decided to wear a dress with those faces and that message, that important, heartbreaking message written in blood and heartache and senselessness, with their faces on her butt, and the word “Violence” over the ladyparts. I suppose she might think that’s cute. I’m convinced that she still has no idea who any of these people are – remember when she sang about Jay-Z songs in “Party In The U.S.A.” but none of her handlers bothered telling her the name of any Jay-Z songs so that she didn’t look silly when asked about one? And the Sinead O’Connor “Wrecking Ball” debacle, where she claimed that the older singer was an influence on her video, smacked, to me, of another instance in which she was given a talking point that was supposed to make her look deep and retro but couldn’t follow through with any actual knowledge, so when Sinead questioned her, it was like “Who are you, old lady?” Her response to her was unkind and not what you do to someone you revere.

So whoever told her it was edgy and sexy to wear the faces of two real men, who died in a very real and not sexy twerking awesome way, on her butt, is an idiot. I guess they wanted her to make a statement, but not the one she probably thinks she’s making. Do you not understand that wiping your butt with something, like a flag or someone’s photo, or even having it anywhere near your butt, is an incredibly strong statement of disrespect and disregard? Do you think that with that smile and her current attraction to hip-hop that she means to say “I wipe my butt with your legends?” If she was, I’d think she was being honest. Awful, but honest.

But for now, I just think she’s being ridiculous. She and her fans might think it’s just a lark, but they’re wrong. There’s this notion out there that intention is more important that impact, that if my butt dress or my blackface Halloween costume or my depiction of dead Trayvon Martin was supposed to be a joke, it’s not my fault if you don’t get it. That’s just not true. And for all those fans who think I’m taking this too seriously – Think of someone you revere and then see how you’d feel is someone wore them on their butt. Seriously. And if that still doesn’t make you angry, then I just don’t get it.